Contact centers originally developed as an analogy to a customer service line. In particular, queue theory has dominated the development of contact centers to date.
Within the last several years, however, significant advances in contact center architecture have been made and movement away from a traditional work/agent queue has developed. One example of such a contact center is described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,619,968, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference. This implementation of the queueless contact center represented a brand new way of thinking about contact centers and how they should be constructed. Through the development of the queueless contact center, some obstacles have been identified and, in most situations, overcome. In general, there are significant advantages to implementing a queueless contact center.
At its core, however, the queueless contact center is still dependent upon a large number of discrete modules and systems interconnecting and communicating with one another. Specifically, the work assignment engine is separate from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which are both separate from Work Force Management (WFM) systems. The work assignment engine is also separate from, Work-Flow (front and back-office), Voice Portal and other interactive voice response (IVR) systems as well as additional reporting and forecasting systems.
A primary problem with existing contact center solutions is that they do not provide a clean or easy way to have the above-mentioned contact center components interoperate. Another problem with the movement away from traditional queue-based contact centers is that the rigid structure of the queue naturally limited the type of data that was considered interesting for purposes of work assignment, reporting, etc. Thus, without the existence of a queue, the amount of data associated with work items and agents (e.g., attributes) has expanded exponentially. Current contact center databases do not easily support the creation of attribute sets (e.g., a set of attributes describing a particular work item or agent). In fact, the contact center database has been manually updated to support each new attribute set or possible attribute set. As a single attribute is added to the contact center, the possible number of attribute sets multiplies. This data expansion severely pushes the limits of current database structures used in contact centers.
What is needed is a more comprehensive solution for developing a contact center, whether queueless or queue-based. In particular, a completely new model is needed to enable the next quantum leap in contact center development.